Cover the center cutout with turf, add scratchers or otherwise decorate as you see fit. Lure your cat onto the wheel and hope for the best.

[Scott Cutler] has a young cat, [Cygnus], that loves to run on a cat wheel and [Scott] had some some important questions about [Cygnus]’s usage of the cat wheel like, how often it’s used ...

and this instrumented cat exercise wheel was the result. To pull this off, [Brent] used what he had on hand, which was an M5Stack ESP32 module, a magnetic reed switch, and of course, the cat ...